


I feel my boots trying to leave the ground

by Em_Jaye



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Female Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mentions of Cancer, Original Character Death(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:07:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28495833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Em_Jaye/pseuds/Em_Jaye
Summary: “They’re going to send me her ashes in a week and that’ll be it. She’ll be gone and I’ll be stuck with all this love for her and nowhere for it to go.”
Relationships: Jane Foster & Darcy Lewis
Comments: 36
Kudos: 91





	I feel my boots trying to leave the ground

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Mary Oliver's "Starlings in Winter"
> 
> Jane's advice is from what my own astrophysicist best friend told me when I was mourning someone who meant so much to me.
> 
> I have no reason to post this except that it says a bunch of things I need to hear every now and then and maybe someone else does too.

The rooftop garden was one of Darcy’s favorite places in the summer. The raised beds would be bursting with squash and tomatoes and eggplant and cucumbers. Thick ropes of flowers wound around the fence and the air was heavy with the smell of fresh dark earth and sunshine.

But that was summer.

It was January. The cruelest kind of January with short, gray days and icy gusts of wind and long nights of biting cold. The garden was little more than a shadow of its former self. The raised beds emptied and packed away from the elements. The benches and tables all covered in a thin layer of old, gray snow that had fallen last week and refused to melt. Of all the places Jane had looked, this was the last place she thought Darcy would be.

But there she was. Sitting on the very edge of a bench, her shoulders hunched around her ears and her coat hanging open, only inviting cold and sickness with every second the silver sky faded toward evening again. Jane sighed and crossed quickly, dropping down to stand in front of her and tug the ends of her zipper together. “I’ve been looking for you all afternoon,” she said, trying to keep the edge from her voice.

Darcy blinked and refocused her gaze from the monochrome skyline back to Jane’s face. “Sorry,” she said, not sounding like she meant it. “I just needed some air.”

“It’s sixteen degrees out, Darcy,” Jane went on as the teeth of the zipper caught finally and she could at least close Darcy’s coat up to her chin. “How long have you been up here?”

Her shoulder moved. “I don’t know. Few hours, maybe?”

Jane’s next heavy exhale formed a thick cloud between them. She rose from her crouched position and sat beside her friend on the freezing concrete. “Did something happen?”

Something else, she meant. Because of course, something _had_ happened already. Something that had started as a cough Darcy’s favorite aunt couldn’t get rid of. It had turned into a biopsy and an operation and a year with one lung. Last month, it had turned to hospice care. And three days ago, Darcy’s favorite aunt—favorite _person_ —had slipped off to sleep and not woken up.

“No,” Darcy shook her head. “Nothing happened.” The wind whipped their hair around too. Too loud for any contemplative silences to pass between them. Jane was freezing. She wanted to go inside. She wanted Darcy to want to come inside so she wouldn’t have to drag her. “She left me a letter.”

Jane braced herself and slipped her gloved fingers around Darcy’s. “What did it say?”

“It was just…” she shook her head. “It was just instructions on where to find her will and what she wanted me to do with the apartment and her clothes.”

“Which is…?” Jane prodded gently when it didn’t seem that Darcy was planning to keep talking.

“She told me to keep whatever I wanted and donate the rest. I found the will where she said it would be—I’m the only person she had to leave anything to so…” she trailed off and shrugged again. “I’ll probably just donate everything.”

“I can go with you to go through the condo,” Jane volunteered immediately. “I’m sure there are things you’re going to want to keep.”

Darcy’s full lips pouted for a second before she forced them into a firm line. “Yeah,” she said in a small voice. “Probably. I just don’t—” her words caught in her throat and Jane watched as she took in a shaky breath. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with all this love I have for her.” Twin tears slipped from her blue eyes and streaked down her cheeks in the second before Jane opened her arms and wrapped them around her.

Darcy’s Aunt Annie was the only family she had left on her mother’s side. Most of the only family she still spoke to. Certainly the only family she really liked. They’d been closer than mother and daughter for as long as Jane had known Darcy. It was Aunt Annie who drove down to Culver to take her niece out for dinner when she was in undergrad. Aunt Annie who loaned her the money for her security deposit and first month’s rent on her first off-campus apartment. Aunt Annie who was the first to hear about every man Darcy dated, every professional victory and disappointment. Aunt Annie who had always picked up every single time Darcy had called, who had listened with endless patience when she raged about her emotionally distant father and his new family. Aunt Annie, the only adult in Darcy’s life who didn’t make her feel like a burden. 

“I feel sick with it,” she said wiping roughly at her face. She’d cried so much in the last week that her skin was rubbed raw and Jane could see tiny red cracks in the delicate lines beneath Darcy’s eyes. “They’re going to send me her ashes in a week and that’ll be it. She’ll be gone and I’ll be stuck with all this love for her and nowhere for it to go.” The ugly sobbing had been done for a few days. Now there were just moments like this, when her face would scrunch up, and the tears would stream while she tried to keep talking anyway.

Jane felt her own chest tighten as her vision blurred. “I don’t think it needs to go anywhere, Darce,” she said finally. Darcy glanced over, waiting for her to go on. “You know, science has been able to quantify all the different kinds of love that we feel. There’s clear evolutionary reason behind just about everything we do.”

“I don’t know that I need a lecture right now, Dr. Foster,” Darcy said quietly.

“Well, too bad,” Jane shrugged. “You’re the one who made an astrophysicist your best friend. This is the best I can do.”

Darcy’s breath fogged in front of her face before she wiped at her eyes again. “Fine,” she sighed. “Tell me about scientifically justified love.”

“Well, when you think about it,” she began, happy to have been granted a little runway for voicing aloud the thought she’d just been kicking around. “It makes perfect sense. We love our friends and our family because they’re our unit. Keeping a close-knit group of other capable humans around of is smarter than trying to go it alone. More resources, more support, no mystery there. And of course, when you give birth, your brain chemistry is permanently altered so you don’t hate and resent this screaming, shitting monster who’s totally dependent on you—”

To Jane’s relief, Darcy snorted and shook her head. “God, you should work for Hallmark…”

“I’m serious,” she laughed lightly. “Parents are biologically programmed to make their children the center of their universe—not because babies are all that cool, but because it’s insurance that the species will continue. And insurance that, as those parents age, they’ll be cared for by their offspring. It’s all very well documented.”

Darcy closed her eyes and rubbed them again. “How is this supposed to help me right now?”

“I don’t know that it will,” Jane admitted quietly. “But there’s no scientific explanation for what you’re feeling.” Darcy frowned into her lap and looked up, urging Jane to keep going. “There’s nothing to be gained, from an evolutionary standpoint, from loving someone who has died. It doesn’t make sense that we keep feeling the way that we do, that we keep loving them just as hard as we did when they were still alive.” She wet her already-chapped lips and swallowed hard. “Which tells me that the people we love—the people we miss—they have to still be here in some form. There has to be some part of them that lingers and stays connected to us. Otherwise that connection would sever itself when they die.” Jane reached her other hand over and covered Darcy’s. “So the love you feel for your aunt doesn’t have to go anywhere. You can just keep feeling it because it’s proof that she’s still here. That she mattered to you enough for the connection you had to keep going wherever she is.”

Darcy’s face looked as though it was about to crumple again. “You really think that?”

Jane smiled faintly. “I’m a scientist, babe,” she shrugged. “I just look at the facts.”

They were quiet for what felt like a long time while Darcy rested her head on Jane’s shoulder and the world grew dark and colder around them. Despite every muscle in her body screaming for warmth and movement, Jane made herself wait for Darcy to move first. She did, finally, wiping again at her face. “My tears are starting to freeze,” she muttered with a joyless chuckle. “Let’s go inside.”

Thanking every force in the universe, Jane got to her feet, pulled Darcy to hers, and hurried inside where it was warm.

_-fin-_

**Author's Note:**

> *kisses*


End file.
